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The Comments

Can you get a print and play on chaturaji. It looks like it would be fun.

Dasch - 18:25, 13/02/2018 - Print-and-play Downloads

Hi to anybody that can help! I have just inherited a woodern board game,which looks like a board for Halma, but it has only 15 squares in each dirrection. The squares are the same size as on a Halma board. This board has been hand made. It has a draw underneath, and would stand on top of a table. It has two pictures in inlade wood just decrative each end of the board,like a veenered picture. Has anybody got any clues as to what this board game could be.?

janice dawe - 19:40, 07/01/2018 - Halma Games

I bought this book a while back and have enjoyed it very much.

Karen Robinson - 00:36, 03/01/2018 - In Summary: a Book Deep But Not Encyclopaedic

The amazon price is now $122.22 for the only copy.  I finally got it through interlibrary loan and scanned it.  In a few years it will be in the public domain and then I hope I can make it available online.  

Karen Robinson - 00:34, 03/01/2018 - H. J. R. Murray: A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess

I've been playing this solo to see how it feels.  I found that almost never did the water pose a hazard; I could almost always just move a different piece.  So I tried the following rule.  After a piece lands on the 26th square, the player immediately rolls again, and must move the same piece.  There's one chance in 4 (if using the four throwing sticks) of getting a 1 and landing in the water.

Karen Robinson - 00:55, 22/12/2017 - Senet

These are just the more prominent regional or historical versions of chess, rather than variants. David Pritchard compiled a whole encyclopedia of chess variants. The magazine Variant Chess which I started in 1990, and which ran for 64 issues under various editors as the magazine of the British Chess Variants Society until 2010, is a source of hundreds. All issues are free to download in PDF form from my website. http://www.mayhematics.com/v/v.htm 

George Jelliss - 19:31, 29/11/2017 - Chess games

This is a shot in the dark but maybe someone out there knows something.

I am looking for some help with identifying a norse era gameboard. I found interesting 5x5 gameboard with a design that is commonly mistaken for hnefatafl (namely the Ockelbo: Picture Stone). Anyone have any information about it? heres a link to the find.

http://mis.historiska.se/mis/sok/bild.asp?uid=349123

Lopt'r - 18:42, 21/11/2017 - A Time for Play

Great site. Please note: tic tac mo

tictacmo.com

Ken Mask - 15:41, 07/11/2017 - Battle Games

In the Tablut can the pieces cross the central square? Congratulations on the wonderful website

Alex Rocha - 23:25, 22/10/2017 - Tablut

As an experiment, I ran the original Welsh text of the ap Ifan quote through Google Translate.  Interestingly, the English output from the software seems (slightly) clearer than the original translation:

"The game should be played with the king in the middle and twelve men around him, with twenty-four men trying to catch him. These are set as follows: six in the middle of each side of the board in the middle six. Both people move the pieces. If there is a piece between the opponent's pieces, then it dies, and the piece is removed out of the game. But if the king himself comes between his opponent's pieces, then if you say "Take care, watch your king!" before moving to that part (ie between two pieces) and if it can not move then it is caught. If your opponent says "I'm your servant!" and put one of its pieces between two of your pieces, then there will be a bad thing from that. And if the king is able to reach the line ... he wins the game."

David - 01:48, 20/10/2017 - Tawlbwrdd Leaflet

I am yet to play this game so I might be misunderstanding things but one of the rules in the leaflet confuses me:  "If the queen is captured, then its owner must, on his next turn, remove the queen from her predicament and place her on any other space on the board." 

I presume you cannot just go and place the queen in the central space...  Does this really mean though that you can re-position your captured queen anywhere, so even if you are captured in one of the outer rings, you can re-place your queen on one of the inner rings and thus gain an advantage?  That would seem to be a disincentive to capturing the queen, unless the inner circles are already well and truly under your control so that there is no room for the owner of the captured queen to position his piece there.  Can you please elaborate on this a bit?

David - 23:58, 19/10/2017 - Agon Leaflet

I have another, more general question about Tawlbwrdd:

since its re-discovery and reconstrution, how popular has it become in modern Wales?  Are there Tawlbwrdd leagues now trying to promote it?  Is it being played as a pub game in many drinking establishments?  I'm interested to learn more about its cultural impact and current reception since it is basically the Welsh national boardgame/national pub game.

Also, are other forms of Tafl played over in England?  I am wondering particularly about the former Danelaw areas, since I would have presumed that that is where it would have been adopted if anywhere.

Thanks and cheers. This family of games is a fascinating subject to learn about.

David - 23:51, 19/10/2017 - Tawlbwrdd Leaflet